Joe Scarborough and Crew: How Did They Ever Get To Be Cool? (They are!)

Well this is one reason. 

I gave up my alma mater, THE TODAY SHOW, for C-SPAN's Washington Journal. But no more – nope.  Now I'm strictly a Morning Joe girl.  My insomniac husband and I start our day with these characters, and there's good reason.  They're smart, they're funny, they have real personalities, and they think and react. Both they and their guests deftly provide more information and perspective, than anywhere else you can go in the morning.

When I started at TODAY the theory was that people felt as if we were in their bedrooms.  That Deborah Norville failed at replacing Jane Pauley (as if anyone could) because she was so perfect, so slick, that she was intrusive.  TV was still one-way then; we produced the show, trying to make it as accessible as possible, but still, we were sending it to the audience, not talking with them.

At Morning Joe – the perfect Millennial programming, Scarborough, (former Congressman) the shredding (den mother?  Zen master? daughter of Zbigniew)  Mika Brzezinski, wise-cracking Willie Geist (former Tucker Carlson producer, son of CBS News Sunday Morning contributor Bill Geist) and the rest of the crew are not in our bedrooms, we're in the studio with them.  There's no "third wall" (I always wanted to produce a show like that,) you see
the cameras, the cardboard Starbucks cups and even the
producers.  We're all in it together.  Conversations with their (very well-booked) guests are smart, sassy and collegial; lots of information emerges but from conversation, not inquisition.  There is very little distance between the audience and the studio – bluster is deflated and humor is the tool of choice.  ALL with considerable elan, explication, foresight and accessibility.

I almost forgot the music.  Most commercial breaks are punctuated with music – often Bruce Springsteen, always connected to the last topic of conversation.  During the campaign, of course, Born to Run and Jackson Browne's Running on Empty were favorites.  It's another way of communicating with the audience – fun and usually spot on.  When it's not music, it's clips from late night comedy or other relevant but irreverent television.

I'm not alone in this – didn't invent a new wheel.  The New York Times has called the show "oddly addicting" (my experience exactly); the Washington Post described it as "a provocative, alternate-universe newstalk show."  From six to nine AM Twitter is full of Joe sightings.

I spent many years in broadcast news, nine of them at the TODAY SHOW, and I've mourned its transformation from the informative show I knew to what seemed to me to be an undisciplined mush called, by many production alums, "Friends in the morning."  It's wildly popular so I'm not condemning it – just saying that it isn't the show I worked for.  Now, after a long, sad period of missing what TODAY was, I see in Morning Joe what it could have (and should have) become.